After four miles, Bob Lander took the wheel while the skipper went outside into the freezing but clear air and gazed up at the rugged sides of the waterway. Ahead he could see the lowish headland of Point Bras where the fjord split. Beyond that, rising to a height of a thousand feet, was the snow-covered peak of Mount Richards. Through his binoculars Tug could see gales of snow being whipped from the heights by the still blasting wind.
This lee would be fine for a while, but should a gale swing suddenly out of the north, it would blast straight down Baie Blanche. That was why Kit Berens had advised running right down into the deeply sheltered Baie du Repos before they brought out the welding kit.
They turned into the long continuing fjord of Repos at 0655 and made their way over almost seventy fathoms of water around the long left-handed bend, which led to the protected dead-end waters below Mount Richards.
Bob Lander slowed to below four knots while they searched for an anchorage. Tug Mottram caught sight of two old, rusting, gray buoys spaced about four hundred feet apart, some fifty yards off the rocky western lee shore. “That’ll do just fine,” he muttered, at once wondering if it had been Captain Cook who had left them there in the first place. But then, still looking through his glasses, he spotted something beyond both his imagination and comprehension.
Speeding toward them, at about fourteen knots, was the unmistakable shape of a US-made Naval assault craft, one of the old 130 LCVP’s, complete with two regulation 7.62mm machine guns mounted on the bow. What was really disconcerting to Tug was the line of big red and white dragon’s teeth painted about two feet high across the shallow bow. Worse yet, there were ten men standing on the deck, each wearing white military-style helmets. Tug could see the sun glinting off the ones worn by the for’ard gunners.
“Where the hell did they come from?” asked Captain Mottram standing stock-still on the deserted deck. He could only guess they were French, but he called out for Kit and Bob to take a look. Lander was thoughtful. “That’s an old Type 272,” he said. “Haven’t seen one of them for a few years.”
But young Berens, sharper by nature and a frontier Texan by heritage, took one look, grabbed for a set of keys, and announced he was headed for the arms cupboard, “RIGHT NOW!”
The Captain pulled his loaded sidearm from his drawer, and Bob Lander slowed the ship to a halt. Moments later the assault craft pulled alongside, and the leader requested permission to board. To Tug’s eye he looked Japanese beneath his big helmet.
Eight of the armed military men on board the LCVP climbed over the rails. Captain Mottram offered his hand in greeting, but this gesture was ignored. Instead the visitors trained their guns on Captain Mottram and his crew. The Captain and Bob were ordered flat against the bulkhead, arms outstretched. Mottram did not reckon his pistol would be much of a match for the Kalashnikovs the raiders carried.
Bob Lander turned to ask by whose authority this action was being undertaken and was felled by a blow to the head from a machine-gun barrel. At just this moment Kit Berens swung around the corner with a loaded submachine gun and opened fire.
Inside the communication room, Dick Elkins heard two bursts of machine-gun fire. He raced to the bridge window and tried to assess the situation. He knew there was little time, and he charged back into his office and slammed both locks home. A half-minute later, the first ax crashed through the top of the door.
Dick had only split seconds. He opened up his satellite intercontinental link, punching out a desperate message…“MAYDAY…MAYDAY…MAYDAY!!…Cuttyhunk 49 south 69…UNDER ATTACK…Japanese…”
At which point the message to the Woods Hole command center was interrupted by an ax handle thudding into Dick Elkin’s head.
Nothing, repeat, nothing, was ever heard from the US Oceanographic Institute research ship again. No wreckage. No bodies. No communication. No apparent culprit. Not a sign.
And that was all eleven months ago.
At forty-one years of age, Freddie Goodwin was resigned to remaining a local newspaper reporter for the rest of his days. He had always wanted to be either a marine engineer or a marine biologist, but his grades at Duke University were not good enough to gain him a place in the MIT/Woods Hole Oceanographic doctorate program.
Which more or less wrapped it up, deep-seawise, for Freddie. He decided that if he could not conduct scientific research on the great oceans of the world, he would write about them instead. And he would leave the academics to his much cleverer first cousin Kate Goodwin, with whom he had always been secretly and privately in love since he first met her, when she was just nineteen, after the death of her father…and his uncle.
Freddie set off into the rougher, more competitive path of journalism and was offered a place on his local newspaper, the Cape Cod Times, after submitting an incisive interview with a Greek sea captain who had been sufficiently thoughtless during a storm to dump a twenty-thousand-ton sugar freighter aground on Nauset Beach near Freddie’s family home.
He attracted the editor’s attention because of his somewhat nifty turn of phrase, and his obdurate tenacity in running the captain to ground in the back room of a Cypriot restaurant in south Boston. The purple pen, which had unhappily proved to be an insufficient weapon to impress the MIT professors, with their tyrannical insistence on FACTS, was just fine for the Times.
The news department in Hyannis also liked facts, but not with the furtive missionary fervor of the scientists. Within a very few years Freddie Goodwin became the lead feature writer on the paper and could more or less pick his own assignments, unless something really big was happening over at the Kennedy compound in Hyannisport, where he was always a welcome visitor.
He was a bit of a hell-raiser by nature, a striking-looking man, and talented, and he probably could have made it in Boston or New York had he been able to tear himself away from Cape Cod. As it was he felt contented enough when his feature stories were syndicated to other papers, including the Washington Post. On reflection, he preferred to live along the humorous, unambitious edges of journalism.
Cape Cod, the narrow land of his youth, his family’s headquarters for four generations, would always be home. He had never married—some said because no one quite measured up to his beloved, unobtainable Kate—but he had his boat, he even had a lobsterman’s license, and he had a stream of girlfriends. In the summer he crewed in the Wianno Senior racing class, and he watched the Cape Cod Baseball League, supporting the Hyannis Mets. In the winter, when the population of the Cape crashes by about 80 percent, he tended to drink too much.
On occasional assignments “off-Cape,” as the locals referred to the world outside their sixty-five-mile-long peninsula, Freddie Goodwin quickly missed the sight of his homeland—not just Mulligan’s bar up in Dennisport, but also the great saltwater ponds, the marshes and the sweeping sandy coastline, the shallow, gentle waters of Nantucket Sound, and the soft warm breezes of the Gulf Stream, which wrap themselves around the western reaches of the Cape for six months of the year.
He particularly missed those gentle breezes as he stood alone in the shadow of the great windswept icy cliffs that surround Christmas Harbor on the island of Kerguelen. And he wept helplessly again for his lost Kate, and for all of the twenty-three Cape Cod seamen and six scientists who had vanished off the face of the earth on that fateful December morning almost a year previously.
He had known many of them, especially Bob Lander. Freddie’s entire family had gone to the funeral of Bob’s wife just two years ago. The Landers had lived within a mile of Freddie’s parents in Brewster for almost fifty years, and the Goodwins were grief stricken by her death from cancer. Freddie wondered how the Landers’ three children were coping with this latest tragedy.
Through Kate, he knew big Tug Mottram, and Henry Townsend, and Roger Deakins, and Kate’s two assistants, Gail and Barbara. The Woods Hole oceanographic community was as tight-knit as any law firm despite the vast size of the waterfront complex, the 1,400 employees, and the 500 students. Those who m
ake long and perilous ocean voyages to the Arctic and the Antarctic in pursuit of deep scientific research are often bound together for all of their days.
Freddie Goodwin could not bring himself to believe the entire ship’s company of the Cuttyhunk was dead. For months he had used the columns of the Cape Cod Times to rail against the government investigation of the ship’s disappearance. He was emotionally and intellectually unable to accept the official report:
There is no evidence to suggest that Cuttyhunk is still floating. It must be presumed that she has gone to the bottom of the Southern Ocean with all hands. The chances of finding any survivors in these inhospitable waters is plainly zero.
At various times Freddie had demanded to know in both his newspaper and in letters to various Washington government departments how anyone could explain away Cuttyhunk’s last message: the assertion that the ship was under attack and that the Japanese were responsible. The Pentagon repeatedly pointed out that the Cuttyhunk had been the subject of an extensive sea search conducted by the US Navy over a period of three months, and that the President himself had ordered a frigate from the Seventh Fleet into the area within hours of the last message from the research ship.
Other government officials had written Freddie back in the self-interested, lethargic tones of the bureaucrat, explaining that “exhaustive inquiries from the State Department to the Japanese minister and indeed to their military High Command, had left everyone in a state of bewilderment.”
“The Japanese,” wrote one official, “are denying any involvement in the incident.”
Freddie had replied by telephone after a couple of good-size glasses of winter bourbon. “Well, what about the goddamned Chinese, or the Vietnamese or any of those other guys out there who look a bit the same to the American eye?”
No one had been able to help, and Freddie now stood beneath these dark, menacing cliffs, staring at the gray, icy waters of Choiseul Bay, shivering despite his heavy foul-weather gear, pondering the tragic loss of Kate Goodwin and the crew of the Cuttyhunk.
Throughout the long ordeal of the past year, his editor, Frank Markham, had been completely supportive. Frank had suggested that it might be a good idea for Freddie to get down to Kerguelen, at the newspaper’s expense, and write a series of features about the island at the end of the world, using the loss of the Cuttyhunk as its centerpiece.
“You find a way to get there, we’ll pay and help you get organized, and then you can have a darned good snoop around and see if anything shakes loose.”
Frank had put his arm around Freddie and told him that if he found one thing, it would be a huge story, and that the experience would be cathartic. “Maybe help you lay your Kate to rest, at least in your own mind.”
And now the star feature writer from the Cape Cod Times stood alone on this blasted shoreline, trying to wipe the freezing tears from his face, and he stared out forlornly at another research ship, waiting with engines running a hundred yards out, the one that had carried him from Miami to Kerguelen.
His final destination was the McMurdo Station, from where he would be airlifted out by helicopter and eventually flown back to Boston. Frank Markham had paid the ship’s owners the sum of $4,000 to hang around for two or three days while the reporter gathered his material.
As it happened they would probably have done it for nothing. Everyone liked the writer from Cape Cod, and he had regaled the crew throughout the long southern voyage with stories about Cuttyhunk and those who sailed in her. By the time they arrived off Christmas Harbor, no one aboard that research ship believed that the whole truth about the ship’s disappearance had yet emerged. Freddie had convinced them all that his cousin might still be alive.
Today, with the sea calm for once, he had been permitted to go ashore alone in a rubber Zodiac, which he had driven into the beach, raised the outboard, and dragged ashore—it was an exercise he had been carrying out in somewhat warmer waters since he was old enough to walk.
Alone with his thoughts and memories, he stared in turn at the landscape and at his chart of the island. A lifelong devotee of Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, Freddie kept telling himself that the answers lay in the “little gray cells.” He had jotted down the known final positions of Cuttyhunk, and looking at his charts he could see they must have run down to Kerguelen’s northwestern headland, right past Bligh’s Cap.
He knew the bow of the ship had been damaged, and he knew the Cuttyhunk had been in heavy weather and was running for cover. The question was, where? Christmas Harbor? Not a chance. In a big wind, they’d have gone farther down. Even in the light November breeze that surrounded him, Freddie could feel the wind backing round in the cliffs. “I bet this place is a goddamned disaster area in a big westerly,” he thought. “It’d come howling round that point out there. What’s it called? Yeah…here we are…D’Estaing. There’s no way Tug would have put into here. He’d have gone farther down the bay, looking for something a bit more sheltered. No doubt in my mind.”
High overhead he could identify the majestic flight of a big wandering albatross. Toward the east in the more exposed area of the harbor, he could see a flight of storm petrels fluttering low over the water. As far as he could tell, nothing else stirred. Christmas Harbor was the most silent place Freddie Goodwin had ever been. Large ice floes, swollen and split by the searing cold, littered the long, rocky beach. Aside from the seabirds, it was a world of total lifelessness.
Standing around Christmas Harbor was not going to help anyone, he knew. Freddie would have liked to walk to the end of the southern headland and take a look at the bays that lie beyond. But he was worried about the boat and the fact that the weather here changed with such terrifying swiftness. So he walked down to the shore and shoved the boat out, jumping expertly onto the bow without even getting his seaboots wet.
He lowered the engine, started it the first time, and chugged out to the harbor entrance, where he swung right. He knew it was about two miles in reasonably flat water over to Pointe D’Aniere, and in those two miles he would cross the mouths of two other bays, both of which he guessed would be even more exposed than Christmas Harbor. He was right. There was no possibility Tug Mottram would have gone in there.
The next bay, beyond the point, was a thirteen-mile-long fjord called Baie de Recques. His chart showed it narrow and deep, heading so far into the rock face it came within three thousand yards of the other side of the island. Its sides were steep, sloping granite walls, and Freddie, who fancied himself a bit of an expert on seabirds, could see through his binoculars a group of shearwaters wheeling fifty feet above the water. He did not consider that this place would have been much of an idea for the stricken Cuttyhunk either, because Recques Bay ran dead straight, due southwest, with nothing between its cold waters and the open ocean. “Even with a westerly,” he murmured, “I bet a gale finds a way into this great streak of a place. Probably round that mountain at the far end. What do they call it…yeah…Mount Lacroix right on the west coast, eight hundred feet above the shore.”
He circled the Zodiac at the mouth of the bay then pushed on around the corner, where he was greeted by huge, black, forbidding cliffs set between a headland called Pointe Pringle and Cap Feron, a mile and a half distant.
Most high-ranging cliffs look grimly impressive from below, as does a great ship from a rowing boat. But to Freddie Goodwin’s eye, this rock face looked nothing short of evil. And he thought of the awful consequences of Cuttyhunk running headlong into them and smashing herself to pieces in the dark, in the howling gale of that far-lost night. “Katie…,” he said, shaking his head, and feeling tears yet again well up in his eyes, as they had been doing for as long as he could now remember.
But that scenario didn’t seem likely. And he told himself sternly that if Cuttyhunk had hit the cliffs there would certainly have been wreckage found, and none ever had been. Tug Mottram would have given such a rock face a very wide berth even in these deep waters; and that Texan kid, Berens, w
as supposed to have been one of the best navigation officers Bob Lander had ever worked with.
The Zodiac was getting a bit low on gas, so Freddie turned away from the black backdrop of Cap Feron and roared back to his floating base at full throttle. He wanted to write up his notes before dinner. Even if he failed to find the Cuttyhunk, he still had a series of feature articles to write. The next fjord, which lay beyond Feron, would have to wait till morning. Freddie stared at his chart. “Here we are,” he thought. “Christ! It runs down there for nearly twenty miles. What’s it called…right here…Baie Blanche.”
The time was 1938 when he finished recording his observations about the seabirds, the seascape, the rising mountains above the fjords, and the unfathomable dark waters in which Cuttyhunk had sailed. He did not believe she was sunk.
He poured himself an heroic-size glass of Kentucky bourbon, splashed in the same amount of tap water, and swigged deeply. He then kicked off his seaboots and sat in the warm cabin in slacks, shirt, and light sweater. He felt the glow of the amber-colored spirit immediately, and, as he did, he saw again in his mind the face of the tall, willowy Kate Goodwin, her soft slow smile, her tawny, long hair, and her unusual, tranquil good looks.
Kilo Class (1998) Page 3
